Afghan farmers have given an indication of what direction they believe the country is heading — and it is not positive.

Opium cultivation has increased for the third year in a row, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. It has increased in 12 out of the 34 Afghan provinces.

The total production of opium poppy — the plant is the raw material for heroin — is expected to reach 388,000 acres — which is how much was being grown in 2008 before eradication and support programs for farmers began turning the tide.

But as Afghans look ahead to post-2014 when all NATO combat troops leave, and with the Afghan government little able to provide the basics for its citizens, the guaranteed income from growing and making opium is a sure thing. In the UN’s survey of 533 villages, 66 per cent said “high sales price of opium” was the reason they grew the crop. Ten per cent mentioned lack of government support as the reason.

Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul are all badly hit by the Taliban-led insurgency and it is no coincidence opium cultivation is higher there than anywhere else in the country. When life is as dangerous as it is in Afghanistan, people want a sense of security. Heroin traffickers and the Taliban, sometimes working together, give the Afghans what their government and the international community cannot.

Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terrorauthor of Seeds of Terror, calls it the “predatory farm support system” where Taliban traffickers hand out poppy seeds, fertilizer, even tractors and pre-purchase the crops as encouragement to meet quotas. “It’s a farm support system the same way that farmers in Canada, the U.S. or Europe get support,” she says.

But it is predatory because the farmers fall into deep debt trying to repay the loans. In any case, if farmers refuse to grow opium poppy, they are threatened with dire consequences, Peters says.

The level of organization is extraordinary.

“In some parts of Helmand and Nimroz provinces in the last six or seven years there have been efforts to reclaim desert area and to irrigate desert areas and turn it into farmland for poppy,” she says. “It is not poor sharecroppers who are irrigating, it is rich drug traffickers.”

By contrast, the Afghan government can’t match these levels of organization and money.

This year, the Afghan government will hand out $18.2 million U.S. as rewards to provinces that reduced poppy cultivation or didn’t grow it at all.

But Afghans need a lot more, says Mark Schneider, senior vice-president of the International Crisis Group think tank.

“That is where you hope if you have a lot of incentives like physical security, you can provide health care, schools, roads and it will convince farmers not to grow. But farmers have little basis for believing that’s going to happen,” he says.

Agriculture has historically been the backbone of the country — Afghanistan has plenty of fertile land and produces delicious apricots, pomegranates, raisins and pistachios to name a few — but the rural infrastructure has been destroyed over three decades.

James Brett, co-founder of Plant for Peace, which helps rural communities and in Afghanistan has a program to help farmers plant pomegranates, says investing in rebuilding Afghanistan’s agriculture would transform society.

“I’ve been here for six years and the donor support we’d need to do this is less than one per cent of the billions that have been spent over the last decade,” he says in an interview from Kabul. Cold storage facilities to store produce and keep it from spoiling before it can get to international markets is one practical solution. If the farmers are lucky, their goods are shipped to neighbouring countries such as Pakistan.

“The Pakistanis store the fruit in cold storage and when it is out of season sell them back to the Afghans at a higher price,” he says. “This is the best place for horticulture in the world but the Afghans are importing fruit from places like China, it’s absurd.”

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